BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Pull of the Past, Both Comforting and Destructive

By CARYN JAMES

Published: February 4, 1989

Neil Bissoondath's voice suggests that of his generation. The 33-year-old novelist, who moved from Trinidad to Toronto when he was 18, is now a settled Canadian. Because he is 20 years younger than well-established Caribbean-born writers - the most prominent is his uncle, V. S. Naipaul - his ties to West Indian towns and his Indian ancestry are that much more tenuous. In this thoughtful, ambitious first novel, he examines what this heritage means now, when it often seems easy and desirable to homogenize ethnic culture. Like many characters in Mr. Bissoondath's deft story collection, ''Digging Up the Mountains,'' the novel's narrator, Raj Ramsingh, discovers that the past has an irresistible pull that is both comforting and destructive.

Born on the fictional island of Casaquemada, north of Trinidad and quite similar to it, Raj has a history that subtly mirrors the recent past of his homeland. ''On the day that Marilyn Monroe died and Nelson Mandela was arrested, Casaquemada received its independence,'' Raj says. Nine years old when the island gained its freedom from British rule in 1962, Raj grows along with Casaquemada, their early promise giving way to chaotic, violent maturity. Neither can escape the multicultural confusion that comes from the historical moment when Marilyn Monroe, Nelson Mandela and colonial rule converge.

This island's convulsed politics gives ''A Casual Brutality'' the trappings of a political thriller. After going to college and medical school in Toronto, Raj returns with his Canadian wife and baby son to set up practice in Casaquemada. He finds that the quiet island he left behind is now on the edge of social collapse. Made prosperous by an oil boom, the islanders are deprived after an economic crash. They are impatient with the dictator, always referred to as ''the old man,'' and fearful of the lawless, army-trained police. Everyone knows of their brutality, which the newspapers never mention.

Almost at the novel's start, the police drag a man they have obviously beaten, a mechanic from the garage across the street, into Raj's office. ''Don't worry, man,'' says a policeman who recognizes Raj from their high school days. ''We're professionals, we ain't want to kill him.'' Raj's knowledge of the incident and of the man's identity places his family in danger.

The tension in this lucid, leisurely novel does not come from its plot, however, but from Raj's confused emotional past, from a life dominated by the family Mr. Bissoondath draws with complexity and precison. Raj's gun-running cousin, Sulein, denies his middle-class education. His kind, civil-servant uncle, Grappler, sees violence as a sad necessity. His beloved grandparents are a tenuous link to the past.

Raj's grandmother had kept her eyes lowered during their Hindu wedding ceremony and could not tell her husband from his brothers when she finally looked at the man she had married by arrangement. In old age, she still wears an armful of silver bangles and a veil ''pinned tightly to her hair by a golden butterfly.'' His grandfather is a quiet shopkeeper who wears a dignified white shirt and tie to the store each day.

They represent vestiges of a past that fails to touch Raj. ''As his faculties slipped from him, my grandfather began occasionally to speak to me in Hindi, the language of his childhood,'' Raj says. ''I understood none of it, this my ancestral language, but I felt no loss, no nostalgia, little curiosity.''

Rebelling against the one tradition he is expected to follow - taking over his grandfather's store - he flees to Canada, where he avoids other Indians and blacks. With painful honesty, he admits, ''I saw myself in these people, saw the admission of weakness and loss implicit in their stares of racial inclusion, their searching for comfort in the simplest of ways.''

Despite a rigid, placid routine of study in his quiet room and occasional escapes to a strip club, Raj's life in Canada ends haphazardly. He drifts into marriage with a woman he hardly knows. The decision to return to Casaquemada seems just as offhanded. His grandfather was ill; his wife wanted adventure. Underneath those reasons, though, was the need ''to seek a safety net'' in his family, to return to the simple comfort he had been rejecting for years.

Those unconvincing, abrupt turns are the novel's weakest spots, though they are clearly part of a pattern. From Raj's casual decision to study medicine - in order to be different from Sulein, who had chosen law - to the troubled independence of Casaquemada itself, Mr. Bissoondath is concerned with the unforeseen, uncontrollable consequences of half-understood actions. Raj's world is filled with casual gestures and sudden brutalities that lead to the island's state of emergency and to the violence that consumes many in Raj's family.

At times Mr. Bissoondath strains for poetic effects that are out of place in this solid, straightforward novel. On a torrid day the sky is a ''cerulean crucible.'' And Raj's bloodless marriage is too often defined by the hackneyed way his wife lights a cigarette as a sign of annoyance.

But few first novels have the depth and reach of ''A Casual Brutality,'' and fewer have the honesty to leave the character's major conflict in an ambivalent state. Though there is an exceptional scene of Raj taking part in a Hindu funeral ceremony, he knows he must ''go, like my forebears, to the future.'' Leaving the past behind becomes a version of continuity, one of the many paradoxes that make Mr. Bissoondath's novel so astute.